Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

[Thomas Wood]

On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 21:42 +0100, Rodolphe Ortalo wrote:
> Le lundi 10 mars 2008 à 13:27 +0000, Thomas Wood a écrit :
> > I've been thinking about the usability of the GTK+ based OpenMoko
> > applications and I have come up with some suggestions I'd like to
> > implement.
> [...]
> > Theme
> > -----
> > 
> > The biggest problem with the current theme is performance. The main
> > issue here is the use of gradients which requires either stretching
> > images or dithering (for 16bit display). Both these are a significant
> > performance hit, so I would like to suggest redesigning the theme to be
> > faster and more efficient.
> 
> Is it really necessary to adjust the theme itself to solve such
> performance issue? My first reaction reading you was: would it be
> possible to use some kind of caching (or static pre-processing) to solve
> these issues (esp. as the UI configuration is not so dynamic)? But I am
> not well aware of all the implications here so I may have a bad
> perception of the problem itself.

This would be one solution, but due to GTK+'s emphasis on
non-static UIs,  this is unlikely to make any impact. Widget sizes are
rarely defined in terms of pixels so that they can scale if the font
size (or some other user option) changes.

Personally, I think the theme could do with some visual improvements
anyway, including some visual simplification (less is more...).

Regards,

Thomas


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